Category: Fulbright – Szczecin Poland

While on the food kick, here is a hamburger at the Bół I Krowa (Bull
and Cow) restaurant in the old city (Stare Miasto).  I have had a
number of hamburgers in Germany and Poland, and I must say that these
are generally better than what I see in the US.  The meat in this
burger is of very high quality as is the bun.  The bun and burger hold
together very well without mess.  The fries are served in a small
pail, which is a fairly common practice here, even in some of the
fast-food restaurants.

I went to the 24-hour grocery store near my apartment and that is what I bought:

• Two liters of fruit juice,
• Two 300g containers of yogurt,
• Three bottles of (good) beer
• Box of six eggs (jajka in Polish)
• Ham (szynka)
• Goude cheese
• Camembert cheese

Total cost is less than 45 złoty (about $11.50).  The prices here are
astonishingly low by American standards, although it must be said that
salaries here are equivalently low compared to us.

And there are dinosaurs.  The sauropod (long-necked dinosaur) is a
beautiful display, with the neck reaching to nearly the top of the
very high ceiling.

There were so many good, in the manner of both informative and
entertaining.  Here, in a room dedicated to the art of taxidermy, is a
large spider (model, the spider would not be this big) that you can
walk around.  But don’t get too close!

Museums have collections, including animals preserved in jars of
formalgahyde (or whatever they use these days).  But here, you walk
right past the collection, with literally, all of it on view.  Behind
the cases in front are shelves and shelves of items, all visible.
What has been in storage has become a beautiful display.  Wonderful!

Still at the Berlin Museum of Nature.  Large museums often have
discovery rooms for children, but this is the first that I have seen
that has microscopes for children to learn about the world of small
things, and there are a lot of children here learning about that
subject.  They were also setting up a birthday party where children
made casts of fossils.  This was not in some outlying upstairs area,
as I have seen at the Smithsonian, this is right off the main display
area and I actually found this by walking into it.  Simply Wonderful!

For the next several days we will have pictures from a trip to the
Berlin Museum of Natural History.  I have been to many science museums
around the world, but this one is in my opinion the best.  It helps of
course to have on display the world’s most famous fossil:  the Berlin
specimen of Archeopterix lithographica, the oldest well preserved
dinosaur that has very bird-like qualities.  (Those who have been in
some of my classes known that we still have flying about us dinosaurs
that we otherwise know of as “birds”).

The workshop is of course not all work.  On the Thursday I led a
walking tour of historic Szczecin, which ends at a pizza place.  Here
we are; countries included are UK, USA, Poland, Estonia, Greece, South
Africa, China, Russia and Sweden.

This is a picture of the workshop in progress.  I speak on Monday on
biostratigraphy and deep sea drilling and then do most of the Friday
program on silicoflagellates, ebridians and the nature of scientific
discovery (a talk called “Serendipity and Silicoflagellates”).  In
between are various programs on diatoms, radiolarians, DNA, sample
preparation and other subjects.

We are preparing for a week-long short course on siliceous
microfossils, with speakers from 5 and students from at least ten
countries.  I am here in Berlin to meet a colleague at the airport.